This paper analyzes the responses of 50 practicing business managers who were asked to identify the most troublesome communication situations experienced by supervisors in their organizations. The authors put the responses in rank order according to two popular management systems, Management by Objectives (MBO) and Organizational Behavior…

This paper describes an experiment in which the Developmental Sentence Scoring procedure, which has been used successfully for scoring sentence complexity in child language, was examined for its usefulness when applied to adult learners of English as a Second Language. The technique is based upon a developmental scale of syntax acquisition within…

This paper provides information on the use of referential communication tasks (tasks that structure speaking and listening behaviors so that participants need to interact to achieve accurate comprehension) in evaluating students' comprehension and listening skills. An introduction discusses interactive listening and the referential communication…

A moot court program developed for undergraduate debaters at Ball State University (Indiana) is presented. Following a brief introduction that establishes the benefits of such a program for the students and the department of communication, the first section of the paper explains how the moot court concept was modified to emphasize communication…

In times of educational retrenchment, decreasing enrollments among traditional students, and restraints on faculty salaries, college educators need to explore new and innovative types of programs such as off-campus instruction in classroom communication for teachers. An off-campus program provides an excellent opportunity for a communications…

The functional communication course described in this paper was created in response to requests by students and administrators at the University of Minnesota for a single course that would combine writing, speech communication, and audiovisual topics. The paper provides background information about the general college of the University, which is…

As one of a series of sharply focused booklets based on concrete educational needs, this booklet provides teachers with educational theory and research on evaluating classroom speaking and presents suggestions for the application of the theory in regular classroom situations. The section on theory and research begins by describing a model of the…

A questionnaire containing all 78 items from the three forms of Robert F. Bales' Interpersonal Rating Forms (IRF) was administered to 266 college students to test the reliability and validity of the IRF. The questions asked for self-perceptions about one's roles and behaviors in task groups. The results indicated that the scales are neither…

Children's speech styles vary considerably, ranging along a continuum from formal to informal, in the various educational and social settings they encounter in school. Teachers who see their role as preparing children to fill social roles will be aware of the speech styles that children use and will accept varying speech styles as appropriate to…

Research on the causes, prediction, and specific problems of learning disabled children is reviewed for the years 1967-1978. The literature on the following questions is examined: Can learning disabilities be predicted and will early identification help alleviate the problem? Can training programs significantly remediate reading disabilities? What…

A paper by Keenan and Klein (1975) provided evidence for the hypothesis that conversationality is present in children as young as 2 and 1/2 years of age. Results of the study indicated that before the emergence of more adult-like coherency operations, the children passed through a period in which such operations were foreshadowed by vocal play.…

This account of the intonation of English is part of ongoing research at the University of Birmingham, England. It attempts to take account of how intonation contributes to the communicative value of an act of speech. An introductory chapter provides a short discussion of some crucial terms: pitch, loudness, stress, rhythm, and tone unit. The…

The acquisition of the copula and auxiliary "be" forms of "am,""is," and "are" was studied with 16 children. Spontaneous social speech samples were obtained from each child. One child's speech was sampled for approximately one hour per week from age 2;5 through 4;0, and for one-half hour per week from age 4;1 to 5;0. A second child's speech was…

The ontogenetic development of human vocal utterances and their role in early interaction processes were studied with a three-month-old baby. Recordings were made of infant vocalizations in the home and the sounds were classified. During a five-minute segment between the mother and infant, the infant produced 59 utterances, 93 percent of which had…

The seminar concept is a form of independent study that allows children the opportunity to learn as much as they like on a chosen topic while they are acquiring valuable library research skills. The child begins a seminar project by writing down all possible ideas he or she can think of for exploring a topic. This is done on a "brainstorming"…